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Crystal A. de Gregory

@hbcustorian

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Thought Leader | Historian | Storyteller
@hbcustory + @dorianandbeyond, Founder
#HBCU. #FiskFamily. #1913.
Posts mine. she/her 🇧🇸

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I have spent most of my life becoming.

Becoming brave. Becoming capable. Becoming the woman who could carry what needed carrying, survive what needed surviving, and find purpose even in places I never would have chosen for myself.

But I am beginning to wonder…whether becoming can also mean receiving.

Receiving love, without earning it through labor. Joy, without first surviving sorrow. Rest, without exhaustion as its price. A life shaped not only by purpose, but by pleasure. By curiosity. By desire. By my own choosing.

I have no grand declaration for this birthday, except for the grandeur of this:

I am still here. I still seek soft things. And I still believe there are beautiful parts of my life I have not yet lived.

Perhaps this next year, too, will teach me…maybe some of the things I have taken far too long to learn:

I don’t have to work my way to worth. I can sit some things out. Time is on my side. God is for me. And a deeply meaningful life does not have to be an endlessly difficult one.

Happy birthday to me.

Oh! I’m in pajamas! by @hbcustorian

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2 months ago

We don’t suffer from a lack of values.
We suffer from stories we refuse to interrogate.

Story is strategy. And strategy determines who is protected, who is believed, and who is resourced.

If you’re ready to do the work behind the words —
I’m available.

Keynotes. Workshops. Writing.

🔗 crystaldegregory.com/bookings by @hbcustorian

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10 months ago

What does it mean to come home to an HBCU—and what, exactly, are we coming home to? 💙💛

Homecoming season invites us to celebrate what we love about historically Black colleges and universities: the traditions, the bands, the beauty, the friendships, the history, the belonging. The feeling of returning to a place that helped make us.

But love of our institutions also requires us to ask what they are becoming.

I’m delighted to have an essay in the Fall 2026 HBCU Homecomings and HBCU Excellence issue of HBCU Times: “Who Gets to Define HBCU Excellence? Rethinking Preparation, Power, and the Future of Black Higher Education.”

In it, I ask us to think beyond the familiar measures of HBCU excellence—degrees earned, careers launched, respectable presentation, professional preparation—and toward something larger.

Because our history tells us that Black education has never been only about preparing Black people to succeed within the world as we found it. At its most consequential, it has equipped us to question that world, challenge its inequities, build institutions, exercise power, and imagine futures that did not yet exist.

And that means the scrutiny we so readily apply to students must also travel upward.

As I write:

“We cannot teach students to challenge injustice in the world while treating trustees, presidents, and administrators as though accountability stops at the campus gates.”

And:

“We cannot credibly venerate yesterday’s Black student activists while punishing present dissent among HBCU students, faculty, and staff today.”

Homecoming is about inheritance. Excellence is about what we do with it.

Grateful to HBCU Times and to Dr. David Staten for making room for this conversation—and especially pleased to have it appear in an issue celebrating the institutions we keep coming home to.

The essay is out now. www.hbcutimes.com

Let’s talk.

#HBCUTimes #HBCUHomecoming #HBCUExcellence #HBCU #BlackHigherEducation by @hbcustorian

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12 days ago

“We were nothing but a bunch of kids. All we wanted was for Fisk to stand.”

Maggie Porter remembered it that simply.

On October 6, 1871—155 years ago today—Porter and eight other Fisk students left Nashville on a fundraising tour intended to save their struggling school.

They became the world-renowned Fisk Jubilee Singers.

Seven of the original nine had been born enslaved. They carried into public concert halls spirituals first sung privately—behind closed doors and drawn curtains, “learning from each other the songs of our fathers.”

They traveled through racist hostility, inadequate accommodations, harsh weather and exhausting schedules. By the European tours, the physical toll was unmistakable. America Robinson wrote that “rest is the thing most desired among us just now.” Jennie Jackson was in severe pain. Maggie Porter suffered problems with her chest. One account warned against treating them as though they were “all superhuman.”

And yet, their laboring voices helped save Fisk.

They helped purchase its present-day campus and build Jubilee Hall, which still rises over 17th Avenue North.

But Fisk was not the only beneficiary.

Long before Lower Broadway, the Grand Ole Opry or Nashville’s modern recording industry made “Music City” famous, Black students from Fisk were already carrying Nashville’s music across the United States and Europe.

The story of Music City begins earlier.

And it begins, in no small part, with Black music.

Jubilee Hall still stands.

So does Fisk.

And 155 years later, Nashville still lives inside what those “kids” helped make possible.

The Original Fisk Jubilee Singers, 1872. Library of Congress. taken in Fisk University by @hbcustorian

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13 days ago

My Dear Senorita…

Yesterday would have been Mrs. Senorita Williams Crawford Locklear’s birthday.

It was the first one without her in more than a century.

I called her My Dear Senorita. She called me “my beauty and brains.”

Already in her late 90s when I arrived at Bethune-Cookman University, Senorita was among the most important people I knew I would ever meet. She had known and worked beside Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune—whom she invariably called “Mrs. Beth-thune”—and carried memories few people living could still tell firsthand.

I went to her, as historians do, looking for history.

I found a friend.

And somewhere along the way, I stopped asking only about Mrs. Bethune.

Tell me about you, Senorita.

Yesterday, on the first birthday that came without her, I found myself remembering what she told me.

And what she taught me.

Head on over to Facebook to read what else I wrote about My Dear Senorita today. 💙 by @hbcustorian

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18 days ago

Eighteen years ago today, my daddy died.

Years ago, I wrote of missing the smell of Brut on his face, the unexpected hum of For All We Know, his laughter, and his determination to do, be, anything.

I still do.

Not because he was an infallible father. But because he was merely a man who, in so many ways, did so much good.

And today, of all days, I find myself thinking about what we do with our dead—how we remember them, how we honor them, how we tell their stories, and how we keep them with us.

I recently spoke with ESSENCE about the Black homegoing tradition and the ways Black funerals function as practices of public memory, collective memory, and historical preservation.

That scholarship has never been abstract to me.

Black people have long understood remembering as an act of love. When official records failed to preserve us—or preserved us badly—we became historians of ourselves, the keepers and tellers of our own stories.

Our homegoings insist: this person was here. This life mattered. This person was loved.

Eighteen years later, I am still learning Daddy’s good lessons—and, as I once wrote, unlearning the bad ones too.

Still remembering.
Still loving.
Still speaking his name.

Harold R. DeGregory Sr. (1924–2008).

And somehow, we endure.

“How We Honor Our Own: The Evolving Art Of The Black Homegoing.” By Melissa Noel. Now at @essence by @hbcustorian

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25 days ago

Black Folks Loved Us Some Ms. Dolly

First of all, Dolly Rebecca Parton Dean was a bright light in a mean world. And Lord knows we are short on those.

As a white woman—perhaps the most famous white woman the American South ever produced—this Grand Dame of Country Music had every excuse not to be anti-racist, anti-homophobic, or particularly concerned with anybody whose life looked different from her own. Born white and dirt poor in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee, it would have been easy for her to go the way of far too much of white America: hateful when afraid, prideful once prosperous, and sanctimonious after she got over.

But not Ms. Dolly.

I write Ms. Dolly not because I’ve forgotten Carl Dean, the man she married in 1966 and stayed married to for nearly sixty years. I write Ms. Dolly because no matter how good her man—and by all accounts, hers was a good one—Dolly never found it necessary to fold her identity into his. She loved that man without losing her own name, her own work, her own money, or her own shine.

Now, now. This is not an indictment of anybody’s marriage. Before you make this about you and yours, keep Ms. Dolly the main thing.

And what a main thing she was. With a waist begging for a waist-trainer endorsement, a bust that had been minding its own abundant business since before most of us were born, nails long enough to gig out with Patti LaBelle, big hair and an even bigger heart, Ms. Dolly was gloriously, unapologetically too much. Maybe that is part of why she never seemed to require anybody else to be less.

Black people did not need to become less Black around her. Gay people did not have to make themselves more palatable. Poor people did not first have to prove themselves deserving of kindness. And when somebody pointed out that something she was doing might hurt folks, Ms. Dolly seemed to possess the increasingly rare ability to say, essentially, well, I don’t want to do that then.

Imagine that.

Continued on Facebook. by @hbcustorian

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2 months ago

Praying for Sissy Stella 🫶🏽 by @hbcustorian

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2 months ago

Y’all have all the smoke for the wrong things. 💨 by @hbcustorian

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2 months ago

“O, Lord, show me my duty!” — Ella Sheppard Moore, 1878

I wrote “Their Highest Calling: The Progressive Ethos of Black College Women in Nashville” to tell the story of Black college women who understood education not simply as personal achievement, but as a calling—to themselves, to their communities, to their race, and to the unfinished work of American citizenship.

Through the lives of Ella Sheppard Moore, Virginia Walker Broughton, and Julia Hayden, I consider Black women’s education, intellectual life, service, sacrifice, and activism as essential—not peripheral—to the history of the Progressive Era.

These women lived and labored within the crushing intersections of racism, sexism, and class, yet understood that the opportunities education afforded them called them to purposes far greater than themselves.

This is the story of how they answered that call.

Their Highest Calling appears in Constructing Citizenship: Tennessee Public Women in the Progressive Era, edited by Mary A. Evins and Minoa D. Uffelman and published by the University of Tennessee Press.

Many thanks to Mary and Minoa for the opportunity and for seeing this work to fruition, and hearty congratulations to all of the contributors.

Out now. by @hbcustorian

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2 months ago

A note on suicide and the persistence of “committed suicide”:

The “strong” blaming the “weak” for taking their own lives under the weight of misery created by human meanness is tantamount to blaming the enslaved for jumping from slave ships instead of blaming the system that made death seem merciful.

And perhaps that is why “committed suicide” has proven so difficult to dislodge from our language. Committed still places the act—and therefore the indictment—on the person who died.

We are remarkably comfortable asking what was wrong with them.

We are far less willing to ask what was wrong with the world around them.

And that’s an “our” problem. by @hbcustorian

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2 months ago

Some people will criticize your garden while holding the flowers you grew. And that is okay.

I know what it is to cry unto the Lord and be healed.

I know what it is to be brought up from the grave and kept from going down to the pit.

I know what it is for weeping to endure for a night.

And I know this too: joy cometh in the morning.

— Psalm 30:2–3, 5 by @hbcustorian

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2 months ago